Monday, 24 February 2014

Mindfulness and Osteopathy. Self-care and Healing

Many of us can (at least most of the time) do this - and observation and
awareness of our moment by moment mental (and emotional) states helps us do
this. However, there may be moments where we lose this perspective - and our
pain, or suffering, or distress becomes 'blurred' with little or no distinction
between primary physical sensations, and our emotional and mental reactions
(and complications) to them.

If we are Health-care providers we may have to work with clients who cannot
easily make this distinction, and they often appear 'stressed' and to lack
'body-awareness'. So an understanding of this - from our own personal practice
and experience - becomes important to help others as well as ourselves. Ongoing
mindfulness practice can be the best strategy for continual learning.

As Vidymala Burch (the founder of Breathworks) puts it:

The first thing is to learn to distinguish between primary and secondary
suffering.

Primary suffering is any unpleasant physical sensations you may experience
as a consequence of illness, injury, fatigue etc. You may not be able to do
anything about this level of suffering and the task is to accept it and make
peace with it as best you can. Breath awareness will help you do this by
learning how to relax into the breath and your body as much as possible.

Secondary suffering is the human anguish we all experience as a reaction to
primary suffering: feelings like anger, fear, depression, anxiety and despair
that we instinctively pile on top of any unpleasant sensation or event in a
dense web of reactivity. With mindfulness, or awareness, you can learn to modify
and reduce these experiences of secondary suffering. This can vastly improve
your quality of life, even if the primary suffering remains unchanged, or even
worsens if you have a degenerative condition.

I would only add the proviso here - that we must also ensure our physical-
physiological (and emotional) needs are met, with adequate self-care, rest,
nutrition, sleep and work-life balance, and so on. This may seem like stating
the obvious, yet it is also worth mentioning, and many people struggle with
this, and may need to give some priority also to their own self-care and
wellbeing.

Adequate and appropriate medical and health care are also important. Beyond
conventional (pharmaceutical) medicine, there is great benefit from
complementary medicine: osteopathy, acupuncture, massage, naturopathy, and so
on.

Although mindfulness can be immensely transformative - even Vidymala Burch
mentioned that she found great relief from her back-pain from cranial
osteopathy (cranio-sacral therapy).

Osteopathy is a wonderful hands-on healing, and I would recommend this to
anyone suffering from chronic (as well as acute) pain, fatigue, stress, etc.